Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a navigation device and an information providing method suitably applied to, e.g., a vehicle navigation device.
Description of the Related Art
In a vehicle navigation device, point of interest (POI) information representing locations of interest, such as restaurants and amusement facilities is registered in a hard disk drive in association with map data. The POI information includes name, latitude/longitude, address, category, phone number, uniform resource identifier (URI), and the like of facility.
Some vehicle navigation devices acquire, from a predetermined server, a rich site summary (RSS) file which is written in extensible markup language (XML) and used for publishing update information of a web site, such as title and summary.
When a given category corresponding to the POI is selected by a user, a vehicle navigation device of such a type acquires, from a server, an RSS file containing information about facilities such as restaurants or amusement facilities according to the selected category. Then, the vehicle navigation device designates the location of position information described in the acquired RSS file on a map image displayed on a display (refer to, e.g., Jpn. Pat. Appln. Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-278807).